


house rules

by synecdochic



Series: mezzanine [9]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, Identity Issues, Imported, Pining, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-10
Updated: 2008-09-10
Packaged: 2018-05-31 05:01:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6456958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/pseuds/synecdochic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>There's a whole lot of things Nielson never does unless he wants to.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Or: Watching your other half come to terms with the reappearance of his Great Love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	house rules

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally [posted](http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/255289.html) 2008-09-10.)

She's curled up in bed drowsing when she hears the front door shutting and the beep-beep-beep of the alarm, and a few minutes later -- time to check his email, scan the house newsgroups for any new messages, and skim through irc backscroll to see if she'd said anything; it's complicated and complex having three separate channels of post-it notes (four if you count instant messenger, though they tend to eschew it for irc instead) but each one has evolved a specific purpose -- Nielson comes through the bedroom door on cat feet. Not trying to skulk -- he knows better than that; she's not the one who wakes up every time the air conditioner comes on, but she still does tend to wake up for people moving around her if there's anything even resembling an attempt at stealth. He just never makes any noise he doesn't want to make.

There's a whole lot of things Nielson never does unless he wants to.

She reads him from the way he's moving; every last inch of the ease and comfort he'd been projecting for Daniel is gone away, and the lines of his shoulders are taut and unhappy. She opens her mouth, about to say something -- question or invitation or merely reassurance -- but his night vision is just as good as the rest of his physical capacity; he either sees her about to speak or hears her taking a breath. He signs _don't_ , in the darkness, knowing her eyes have adjusted to the low lighting they keep until she can see him just fine, knowing she's watching him. She hesitates, wondering if she should say it anyway, and he repeats the sign again, sharper and more vicious this time: _don't_ , his hands slashing through the air as he stalks across the room, and then -- in case she misinterpreted, in case she thought he was just gesturing -- he clarifies: _don't want_. 

Her only consolation is that, as he passes the bed, he flaps one hand trailing behind him: _not yet_ , not _no_. It's been a long time since he hasn't been able to talk to her, especially at night and in the dark. Even in Washington a month ago, when they'd sent General Jack off to his rest (goodnight, Godspeed, sleep well; you've earned your peace) and first seen Daniel again, Nielson had been all right. A bit touchy, but all right.

Tonight, though, he strides into the bathroom, shedding clothes as he goes, throwing them onto whatever piece of furniture is close enough -- she winces; those leather pants are never going to be the same -- and shuts the door behind him. She can see, underneath the door, the bathroom light come on, but not any more brightly than a nightlight might. After a minute, the sink runs; a minute after that, the shower. 

She settles her shoulders back against the pillow and sighs. Knew it was coming. Didn't have to like it.

The LED clock says it's 0221; last time she looked at it was around midnight. Daniel had excused himself around twenty-two thirty, and she'd waved him goodbye (wanted to hug him, didn't want to risk it), tended to the email Nielson had mentioned, settled herself in bed around 2345 to wait for Nielson in the dark. He doesn't usually stay out past midnight mid-week; Carlos is a county prosecutor who has to be up early in the mornings. She must have dozed off, waiting for Nielson to come home. 

She's nearly dozed off again -- half-sitting, this time, her shoulders pushed up against the pillows and her head resting against the wall -- when the shower clicks off, and the clock says 0253 when she opens her eyes again. She counts down backwards in her head -- one ninety-nine, one ninety-eight -- and hits thirty-four (a new world record) before the strip of light beneath the door fades to nothing and the door opens. She pushes herself up, palms against the mattress, studying him and trying to decide whether it's a time to give him what he's asking for or a time to give him what he really needs.

But whatever monsters were snarling inside his head seem to have been washed down the drain along with his clubbing makeup and the sweat from dancing (and whatever else he and Carlos were up to), because he seems much calmer as he towels his hair dry, crosses the room (naked and unerring in the dim nightlight glow) to drop the towel into the hamper. "How was the rest of your night?" he asks her, calm and unforced, and she squints at the lines of his shoulders, the set of his jaw, and tries to piece things together.

It's a hundred small details, all added up: the way he couldn't bear to talk to her before he got a chance to shower, the way he was in the shower for half an hour when usually he's in and out in under five minutes, the way he only spends so much time in the bathroom when he's sitting in lotus on the floor of the shower with the water falling around him, working his way through something inside his head from beginning to end before rising up and going to face the world again. Could be Daniel. Could be something else. Could be Daniel _and_ something else, insult to injury, which is likelier than not, because she and he sat down and talked it over long before Daniel called to try to discharge social obligations, and Nielson had sworn he'd be all right with things no matter how things shook out. She'd believed him, or she wouldn't have invited Daniel home to dinner. 

But there are different layers of 'all right', and this is one of the ones that isn't really, no matter how good Nielson is at pretending. 

"Not bad," she says, quietly. "Better'n yours, looks like."

His head comes up, but he doesn't turn around; she can see the long skinny line of his back, always more muscular to the touch than it looks, and the way his shoulders flex as he lifts a hand and drags it through his damp hair. "Can we not?" he asks, more plaintive than angry, and she shuts her mouth on whatever else she was going to say, because when Nielson's hurting he gets vicious, but when Nielson's lost he sounds younger than the body he was wearing when she first met him and she's never been able to stand against that sound. "I'll tell you later," he adds. "I just ... can we not right now?"

She breathes out, one explosive sigh, and tries to stifle the yawn it prompts. "If you promise nothing's broke and nothing's bleeding," she says. 

He lets the lid of the hamper fall down again and turns, and when he looks back at her, his face looks different in the dark, angles and shadows almost like a stranger's. The smile he wears looks like a stranger's, too. "Carlos has decided to pursue other opportunities," he says, light and airy like it doesn't bother him at all, and she carefully schools her face before she can present so much as a hint of a wince, because she'd _liked_ Carlos, they'd both liked Carlos, Carlos had been one of the few semi-significant others Nielson had found who'd shown signs of actually _getting_ this weird life they've found themselves leading, and she'd been starting to think Carlos might stick around for a while. She stifles the thousand questions that leap to her lips -- _why, what happened, what did he say, was it anything to do with me, was it anything to do with us_ \-- and ruthlessly throttles the sympathy that threatens to rise behind it. Nielson's asked for a time-out, and usually she wouldn't give it, but there's really only so much a man should be expected to have thrown at him in a single night.

So she just flips back the covers on his side of the bed, wordless invitation, and rolls over so she's lying on her side, facing away from where Nielson will come to settle. A promise, a token of her willingness to leave matters be. They fight wordlessly over territory and who's going to have to be the body pillow every night, but tonight she thinks he'll do best curled up behind her, his nose against her hair, his arms cradling her with the knowledge that she can't see whatever's on his face. It's the position they always wind up in on the bad nights.

She'd watched Daniel's face out of the corner of her eye when she'd brought him into the master suite on the tour, calm and matter-of-fact like she'd been for the rest of the house, waiting to see what Daniel would say about the his-and-hers walk-in closets, the single custom-sized bed, the nightstands to either side. (Hers contains a stack of the romance novels she knows _damn_ well Nielson reads when there's nothing else around and a half-dissembled handheld mp3 player unit she's idly trying to crack the hardware-based DRM on; Nielson's contains a stack of back issues of _Computational Linguistics_ , heavily annotated, and a pair of earplugs for the nights when every little noise wakes him.) That's the step potential suitors usually trip over, and while she's being careful (so careful) to avoid thinking the words 'Daniel' and 'suitor' in the same sentence, it's still on her mind. They've given Daniel enough pieces for him to realize things aren't exactly what they look like at first glance; it's up to Daniel what he does with them. 

But Daniel had barely seemed to notice. Of course, Daniel had spent the entire night half a step away from a _gibbering wreck_ and she'd wager good money he didn't even know how thin a line he was walking, always watching the lines-of-sight and the exits and practically screaming out for a whole hell of a lot of care and tending. She'd tactfully glossed over many of the details, just like she'd glossed over pointing out any of the security features (no need to call his attention to the need for security; she wants him to feel like this house is a safe haven, but she's pretty sure showing him all the details of _how_ would only make him start thinking about all the things that could threaten him, as opposed to the condo in DC, where he'd needed to be _shown_ how he was safe to coax him off his immediately-pressing ledge) or any of the more high-end technical improvements. (Then again, they don't show anyone the more high-end technical improvements. The house is a genuine miracle of cutting-edge technology, but they've been careful to make it unobtrusive, and they _keep_ it that way for visitors; there's a couple hundred grand of improvements, easy -- not to mention the resale value of the intellectual property involved -- and they try not to flaunt it in front of anyone, strangers or family alike.) Daniel had taken everything with the same vaguely puzzled frown and the same slight aura of well-hidden incipient hysteria; he hadn't asked questions.

She's glad he hadn't, because she can't yet tell which hurdles Daniel will be able to clear and which ones he'll catch his heel on. Ten years between the last time Daniel saw O'Neill and the first time he saw Nielson (she doesn't count that first week or so of overlap, even if Nielson might; he wasn't _Nielson_ yet then), and she has no idea what the relationship might look like through Daniel's eyes. Nielson's in love with Daniel and will be until his end of days, but the directional graph of love isn't commutative and its edges and nodes aren't reciprocal and she _knows_ (Daniel had told her, with his eyes, with his face, when Nielson had come into that kitchen) that Daniel's never suspected an inch of any of O'Neill's secrets.

She doesn't doubt Daniel loves -- loved -- O'Neill. She doesn't doubt that Daniel knew O'Neill loved him. She just knows it's not the same kind of love, and she doesn't think Daniel would use the word, and she wonders how much Daniel will keep himself from seeing (a little, a lot) about Nielson, lest he have to wonder what it says about O'Neill.

So it would be easy for Daniel to dismiss everything she's explicitly told him (given him the outline of what is, up to him to decide what he wants to do with it) and decide that she and Nielson are lovers, even though "lover" is the wrong term for what Nielson is to her and always will be even if "beloved" is-and-always-will-be true, and she'd watched him for signs of leaping to that conclusion with both feet, found none. But if he'd taken what she'd told him at face value, it would be damn easy for him to think less of her-or-them for what can look damn weird to an outsider, to so many people who can never understand (grownup adult American humans don't sleep together regularly unless they're also _sleeping_ together, and she's always thought that was a shame), and she'd watched him for signs of _that_ , too. 

Found none, and she's thinking that right now most of Daniel's energy is going to keeping Daniel _Daniel_ , leaving him with little left over to spare for analyzing the quaint home customs of the native folk, and she's pretty sure that by the time they're done healing Daniel up a little (and she hopes like hell Daniel will let them heal him up a little, because he's a good man with a good heart, and it hurts Nielson to know that Daniel's been so badly damaged) it'll just seem second nature to him. She hopes it'll seem second nature to him. She's pretty sure that if Daniel ever mentions it to Nielson, ever brings up the topic directly or by implication, Nielson's implosion will be visible from _space_.

"Stop thinking," Nielson says, irritated and snappish. His breath stirs her hair. "I can hear you thinking."

She has half a second to decide how to play it, goes for their usual line of discourse. "'Least you're admitting I think. You wanna put that in writing?"

He chuckles, soundlessly; she can feel it, skin to skin, where he's draped over her back. But he doesn't go for the return sally she deliberately left herself wide open for ( _that would require you to know how to read_ ), and from that she takes that he's not in the mood for banter. She pulls the comforter to one side -- doesn't need it, not with Nielson the human furnace trying to spread himself all over her skin -- and closes her eyes. Not much else she can do right now. She'll start to figure things out in the morning.

He's up before she is, of course -- only time in ten years she's beaten him awake-for-good instead of awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night-from-pain has been the time when he came down with the chicken pox. (Twenty-three years old, and he'd sworn up, down, and sideways that Janet Fraiser, rest her soul, had vaccinated him to hell and gone before letting him out into the world and chicken pox had been on the list, but it hadn't stopped him from picking it up during one of the Family outbreaks when they'd been home for the summer; it would have been funny if he hadn't been so damn pathetic. Only time she's ever seen him sick.) When she makes her way out into the kitchen, he's sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a pair of boxer-briefs and nothing else, feet folded up onto his thighs in the careless fashion that she tries so hard not to be jealous of. There's a cup of coffee to his elbow, an open tin of the oatmeal raisin cookies next to it (and she sighs, because she baked two pounds of the damn things two days ago and he's eaten them down to nearly crumbs and it's _not fair_ he can do that, dammit), and he's got the latest issue of the _Journal of Intelligent Systems_ fanned open in one hand.

Cammie brushes her hand over his shoulder as she goes by (he makes one of his usual irritated-but-not-really noises) and heads for the coffeemaker, thump thump thump. "Pedersen's got a good article in here this issue," he says, in lieu of good-morning. "He's wrong, but it's interesting."

"I'll take wrong-but-interesting over right-but-boring any day," she agrees, half-yawning. _That's how you wanna play it, that's how we'll play it._ "Anything we can use, or no?"

"Dunno," he says, offhanded, not bothering to look up from his reading. "Maybe. Have to go check his code later and see if it's correctable or if he's barking up the wrong tree entirely. Dammit, I wish I'd had the patience to go do penance in academia for a while. We only get this shit once it gets through the gatekeepers."

Familiar refrain, familiar problem. "Keep telling you," she says, bringing her coffee over to the table and settling herself on down. He pushes the tin of cookies over at her; four cookies left. She takes three and puts them on a napkin, pushes the tin back at him. "I could do the Ph.D. in, oh, three years, if you think it'd help. We could stand to lose me for that long if we scale things down enough."

Nielson sighs and puts the journal down. He takes the last cookie out of the tin and bites into it. "Not worth it. Not really. I'm just sick of 'high school dropout' being the adjective-of-choice for me, is all." 

And don't she know what's gotten him all het up about things this morning, too. "Adjectival phrase," she says, through a mouthful of cookie of her own, which earns her a scowl. "We been gettin' press again? I didn't see anything in the alerts last night before I went to bed, but I haven't checked email this morning yet."

"No," he says, and he's a million miles away. "Just ... you know."

She does, and knowing doesn't make it any easier for her to figure out what she can say to make things better. They don't get a _whole_ lot of press attention, but they get some -- Nielson-Mitchell's reputation is golden in the military-industrial contractor world, and they're starting to get some play outside it, thanks to Nielson's patient and careful stewardship, their family connections, and the fact that they're damn fucking good at what they do -- and their press package, corporate website, and CVs have been carefully edited to within an inch of their lives. It's Cammie's resume that carries them, and always has been. Their story's always been that Nielson's the boy genius and Cammie's the experience and training, and it's worked for them so far, but there are doors that aren't open unless you've got the academic cred as well as the real-world experience.

And at this point either one of them could finish the Ph.D. fast as hell if they needed the respectability boost -- about half of the work they've been doing would more than qualify as dissertation material -- except Nielson doesn't even have his _bachelor's_ , and he didn't bother officially taking the GED until they were already settled, and Jack O'Neill's Master's in Operational Research was awarded before JD Nielson was even born. Kinda hard to pull transcripts when the dates don't match like that. And Nielson's about as likely to sit through four years of undergrad and then five to ten years of graduate work as she is to run a marathon, and none of this has anything to do with the second phase of Nielson's master plan and it has everything to do with Nielson standing face to face with Doctor Daniel Jackson, Ph.D. to the third degree, and wishing he had something more to throw in Daniel's face and prove his competence using the symbols Daniel respects, and there is absolutely no way in hell she can say any of this out loud and not start World War Three.

"Yeah," she says, and she tries for understanding without pity, and the death-glare look she gets back -- from underneath lowered lashes -- tells her that she probably didn't hit it as well as she was hoping. "We gonna fight about the things we're not sayin' now, or are we gonna hold it until after we get through coffee and email?"

That earns her a startled look, and she braces herself for the shouting. But all Nielson does is stop and sigh, deflating like a leaky balloon, and after a second she judges it safe to reach over and put a hand on his wrist, and he turns his hand over and slides through her grasp until he's holding her hand, his fingers warm and strong.

"Sorry," he says. "It's not you. It's not him, either, really. It's just ..."

"Nobody handles this kinda shit gracefully," she says. "Don't matter how much you want to."

That earns her a little lip-quirk of a half-smile. "If anyone's ever been in this situation ever before now, I'd be pretty damn shocked." He puts down the journal, reaches across himself, picks up his coffee mug with the hand that isn't holding hers. "The old guy never told him. I don't have to ask to know that the old guy never told him. Which means ... I can't. Not ever."

Jack O'Neill, God rest him, has always been "the old guy" in Nielson's frame of reference, and it had started out derisive and wound up affectionate by the end. ( _Mistah Kurtz, he dead; a penny for the old guy_ ; she doesn't doubt for an instant that he knows all the bits and pieces of resonance and allusion it sparks.) "'Ever' is a long time, baby," she says, gently. "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."

"No," Nielson says, firm and resolute, the sound of him digging in his heels, and he calls _her_ stubborn like a mule but it's nothing compared to what happens when he gets his back up. "Never. They're not my stories to tell. They never were, and I promised him I wouldn't, and I've kept that promise this whole time. I'm not going to break it now. Not with Daniel. With anyone else -- maybe. But not with Daniel."

Cammie sighs. "You told me," she says, and it's not an argument, because she knows damn well what the difference was.

His lips quirk again. "And for everything past those first few pieces, he knew I was doing it, and he wasn't happy about it, but he told me he could cope." Which is a shock, because she hadn't known he and O'Neill had ever brought the matter up. She'd known General Jack approved of her, but that's something she hadn't been expecting. "And you're a different story. Always have been. Category of your own. Daniel is ... Daniel was always his. You're mine. Big difference there."

Having this conversation before coffee is a bit of a bitch, so she takes another gulp of hers. He eyeballs the level in her mug when she puts it down; before she can say a word, he's letting go of her hand and getting up, bringing the carafe back over to the table and refilling his mug, topping up hers. Watching him in motion is always a delight, but this morning it's avoidance, not him taking care. She props her chin up on her hand and watches him, though, and she ticks over what she knows of him and what she knows of Daniel and tries to think her way through to figure out what'll serve them best.

"You don't think Daniel knows any of it, do you," she says. Not quite a question. She'd met Daniel Jackson twelve years back, doped up to the eyeballs, and he'd been a different man then than he is now, and that had been after O'Neill had known him for years and years already, and neither she nor Nielson has seen him in the space intervening, but she's pretty sure Nielson can tell a full tally of all the ways Daniel's changed and all the ways he's stayed the same. Just by looking at him, even. Nielson (O'Neill) and Daniel spent seven, eight years under each other's skin, just like she and Nielson have, and if she and Nielson spent a decade apart and then came back together again, she'd still be able to read him too. "Not just that O'Neill never told him. You think he doesn't even suspect."

"Daniel's a little oblivious sometimes," Nielson says, his back to her, replacing the carafe in the coffeemaker, and her heart breaks, because Nielson's voice is full of boundless affection and love and understanding all wrapped up into one, the sound of someone who loves completely and understands too damn well, and Cammie always thought that someday she'd find her Grand True Love and pitch head-over-heels and looking at Nielson, now, she realizes that this is what Grand True Love looks like from the outside. Twelve years, it's been, since Nielson was born from O'Neill's life and O'Neill's memory, and there's distance and there's been healing, but Nielson's still turning towards Daniel like the needle on a compass turns to magnetic north. 

"I could tell him for you," she says. "If you can't." Could do it without his say-so, but that would be wrong, even if done for his own good and even if she thinks General Jack would have understood. Wouldn't be the first time she'd done something sneaky for his own damn good, just like he's done for her in the past, but there are some things you can do an end-run around and some things you can't, and this is one of the ones you can't.

"No," Nielson says, before she's even done talking, and yeah, that's what she'd been expecting. "Not my place. Not my story. Daniel's never going to get to say goodbye, now, and I am _not_ going to be his voice from beyond the grave." He lifts a hand, scrubs it over his face. "I don't -- I don't even know what they've been to each other since then. I can guess why the old guy let him go. I don't know why he went. I don't know what he's been running from."

Cammie sighs. "Maybe he was just running," she says. She watches her own fingers break apart the last cookie, shredding it into pieces, and catches herself thinking about guardians and gatekeepers and prices you have to pay. "You tell me what you want to do about all of this, baby. You know I got your back."

"I know," Nielson says. She can feel his gaze falling on her, and looks up to see that he's turned around, that he's watching her again. "Believe me, I know." Love there, and gratitude, and the sound of his wonder at their life together, and if it's not the same as he sounds when he talks about Daniel, well, it's still something she wouldn't trade for all the tea in China or all the money in the world. "And if I had any fucking clue what I wanted to do, I'd tell you in a heartbeat."

"Don't gotta figure it out right now," she says. "We've got time, still."

He shakes his head. "Not really. Unless you want Daniel to disappear forever when he looks back at last night and second-guesses himself, you're going to have to call him today and bully him into agreeing to come over tomorrow. And it's best to hit him in the morning, before he gets a chance to really get settled. Assuming you _did_ manage to get him to agree to come back."

She nods. "Mostly. He's hurtin' pretty bad. I can't believe they let him out of there in that condition."

Nielson snorts. "Yeah, well. Program's shrinks have sucked since the dawn of time. And Daniel's damn good at hiding things." He strides across the kitchen, opens the fridge, stares into it. If he's seeing a damn thing in there, she'll eat her coffee mug. "I want him to be _happy_ ," he says, after another minute of silence, and the sound of his voice is a lamentation and a wailing boiled down to nothing more than a few bare syllables.

"You know I can help him," she says, as gently as she can. And it's true; with all the experience she has taking care of family, she can figure out _something_. Daniel's case might be the worst she's ever seen, and everyone's different and everyone's their own set of problems, but she has a good sense of how she'd start. "You know I know what I'm doing with shell-shock and people who can't figure out how to come all the way home. But the last thing I want is for you to be miserable while I'm doin' it."

He laughs, and it's half amusement and half agony. "Can't always get what you want, Mitchell. And when you can't, you take what you can." He shuts the fridge without taking anything out of it. Turns around. Crosses his arms over his chest. Looks straight at her, and it's clarity and calm and truth even through the suffering. "Daniel needs somebody to love, and he needs somebody to love him. You think you can be that person?"

It's the question they've been avoiding for the past month and a half. Because Nielson knows damn well what her type is, and Nielson knows damn well that she's sick and tired of one-night stands and six-month there-and-gone relationships, and Nielson knows damn well that she's decided it's going to be solo or long-term from here on out, nothing in between. And she realizes, looking at him looking at her, that he thinks Daniel might be able to be that man for her, and he knows Daniel Jackson a hell of a lot better than she does, and if he thinks that, he might may well be right, and they haven't been having this conversation because it's not _fair_.

World's not fair. Never has been. Doesn't make it any easier.

So Cammie wraps her hands around her coffee mug and looks straight back at him, and she gives him truth the way they always give each other truth, and it's been ten years they've been having and not-having these little talks and maybe they've finally got the hang of it by now, because he just looks back at her clear and open. "Be pretty damn easy to care about the man. You think you can live with knowing I could have something you always wanted and never could get?"

Nielson sighs. "Keep asking myself that same question. And I keep circling around. Yes. And no. And yes. Mostly yes. I want him to be happy. You'd be good at making him happy. And if I can't do it myself, you're the only one I could watch him with and not want to strangle." The corners of his lips tip up. "When I want to strangle you, it's for other reasons entirely."

Some men, she'd have to take that answer and throw it out the window, because it'd be self-delusion or self-denial. When Nielson says something like that, he says it because he means it, and he says it because it's truth, and he says it because he's gone climbing inside his head and excavated all the shadow-places until he could haul them out into the light. So she nods at him, and he looks back at her, and she can see something easing in his shoulders like something's been settled, even though nothing really has. "You tell me if anything changes," she says, and he sighs again and nods, and might be that nothing's really settled, but at least they've got the cards on the table. 

"Eggs and sausage for breakfast?" he asks, like the past ten minutes haven't happened at all, and she blows out a laugh and shakes her head.

"You just ate a pound and a half of oatmeal raisin cookies," she says. "Don't tell me you're still hungry."

"So, I won't tell you," he says, and turns around to open the fridge again. Takes out the eggs, rummages around in the drawer until he finds the sausage, surfaces with package in hand. "Or I could do French toast. Even if mine isn't anywhere as good as yours."

"You are _not_ going to guilt me into getting up and making your ass breakfast," she says. "Eggs are fine. Over easy for me, an' there's bread in the breadbox for toast. Then get your ass over here and tell me what happened last night with Carlos."

She'll call Daniel after her shower, before they settle down for the day for work. She's pretty sure she can talk him into coming over again tomorrow. Might lead somewhere. Might not. Doesn't matter. Nielson loves him; Nielson will love him until his end of days, and Daniel's hurting, and Daniel won't let Nielson help (not without a lot of work first; she knows damn well Daniel looks at Nielson and sees nothing more than evidence of how crazy his life has gotten over the years, and that'll take a long damn time for him to get over), so it's up to her. She can live with that. 

Whatever else happens past that, they'll take it as it comes.


End file.
